28 Sep 2016

The fourth of UNSHINE: Part 6

The synthesizers for our 4th album. Done.This massive amount of work which has been done so far is finally coming to a goal.The guitar mixings were compiled few days ago. This time we had around 60-70 tracks of guitars (and basses) for each song. We had several micings from our Churchboat home studio (with amp isolation) and we made also few re-ampings for the rhytm guitars in the D-studio from the DI-tracks from our home studio.

The next bigger thing will be the final mixing of all the tracks, this will take place as soon as we will get the time slot to do it.What comes to the synthesizers and keyboards, we have used a pretty different approach each time with our three albums.In the first album, Earth Magick, the synths were recorded (due to lack of time & money) in around 3-4 hours with presets of just one synth, Yamaha S30. However, it is actually a very good synth with few incredible sound banks the sounds and it can be adjusted in real time when recording with it. In the second album, the Enigma of Immortals, we used Yamaha again, but also Miroslav Philharmonik Orchestra from IK Multimedia trying to achieve a more symphonic sound. We think it worked very well. In, Dark Half Rising, the palette was expanded with virtual Korg M1 and Sonic Synth. The amount of keyboards was not as layered as in the previous one. And now, with this forthcoming music, there are also some new synth additions, including Roland Fantom-X7, which is a great workstation. So, in the beginning of the recordings for this album, I thought that there would be less synthesizers because there are many different types of guitars included in this one (and I thought that this would kind of a compensate them). Ah, it seems that this was not the case. More guitars meant also increase in the synths. So far, I've used all the synths in our home studio, including physical and virtual ones, most of the banks and programs within them. This time, the general idea has been to rethink the whole approach to the synths, as there are so many ways to use them and I am not talking only about different sounds. You can approach also one single sound in countless ways and try to produce something new. I think that the synth section sounds now quite unconventional for us and doing it has been great fun. The stylistic variation is probably larger than in all three first albums altogether. So, the aim has been to find music that sounds like us, not anybody else. To make music just for the music, not for radio or social media fame and attention, that is the idea behind. Of course, this does not mean that possible listeners should be alienated from it.Remember (or listen to the) the mid 1970's, which gave birth to considerable amount of classic electronic, prog and rock albums. These albums are still considered the best albums of all times and some of them are still actually the most selling albums in the world, because new fans find their way to their uniqueness of year after year. In these albums, musicians of those days used also their instruments in much more unconventional way than today. Those composers had surely some secret ingredients from the universe in their morning coffee, tea or whatever. Maybe their general concentration was also more on music itself if we compare those times to the state of music industry today.